Mira Super Gears Up for Full Universe Simulation

Over at the Atlantic, Ross Andersen writes that the Mira supercomputer is scheduled to run the largest, most complex universe simulation ever attempted. The simulation will cram more than 12 billion years worth of cosmic evolution into just two weeks, tracking trillions of particles as they slowly coalesce into the web-like structure that defines our universe on a large scale.

What makes all of these simulations possible is the sheer size of the supercomputers,” said Salman Habib, senior physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory. “For example, the Mira has close to a petabyte of memory. If you tried to do a simulation like this on a normal computer, you wouldn’t be able to fit it, and even if you could fit it, if you tried to run it, it would never finish. With Mira, we’re able to complete these universe simulations in the span of a week or two.”

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